Signal Hill is located in the Greater Los Angeles area. The hill that the city is named after is 365 feet (110 m) above the surrounding town of Long Beach. Because of this height, it was used by the local Tongva Indians for signal fires that could be seen throughout the surrounding area and even out to Catalina Island, 26 miles (42 km) away.

Ubuntu on BeagleBone Black

Recently, I have decided to try another hardware which is a little bit faster and there are numerous Linux distributions available for that.The name of the new toy is BeagleBone Black. Successfully tested application on this configuration:- FTP server- Web / Apache server- NAS / Samba server- USB 3G Mobile Internet Dongle

I have ordered online from a Swiss shop and I bought a DC 3A adapter for the board, as a recommendation from the shop.Important difference compared to the Raspberry Pi, that the BeagleBone Black has got an embedded 2GB eMMC flash storage, so when you buy it comes with a Ångström Linux loaded into its eMMC.So, when you receive the unit just connect the LAN and Power cable and the board will boot into the Ångström Linux.

Default username is root, and no password set, just hit ENTER and you are in via SSH.

I was playing around with the Ångström Linux but soon decided to change it to the system I know much much better.Change to Ubuntu Precise 12.04.3 LTS

4 Steps to follow:Step 1) Download and write the Ubuntu image onto a microSDHC flash card.I bought a Sandisk 8GB microSDHC class10 card as they seems to be fast and reliable.I used a linux computer to write the image onto the microSDHC card with the following commands:

# sudo suNote these instructions apply equally to mmc block devices such as /dev/mmcblk0 if you are booted to a device with an SD card. Please be careful as writing this image to the wrong device will corrupt the device. Run an ls /dev/sd* command before and after inserting the microSD card so you can be 100% certain which device is your microSD.

# xz -cd ./ubuntu-13.10-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz > /dev/sdb

It takes a few minutes. After the file has finished decompressing and copying to the microSD card, need to reload the partition table.

# partprobe /dev/sdb

If you have only a Windwos computer you can use “win32 disk imager” to load the Ubuntu image onto the microSDHC card.

BeagleBone Black Ubuntu Precise 12.04.3 LTS

Step 2) Boot into Ubuntu

Insert the microSDHC card into the BeagleBone Black.The BeagleBone Black will try to boot the internal Angstrom image by default. To boot from microSD, you’ll need to hold down the USER/BOOT button (located near the microSD end of the board) while powering-on the device.Once it has booted you can SSH into the board. Default username is ubuntu and default password is ubuntu.You can run a update and upgrade now to make your system up to date:

# sudo apt-get update# sudo apt-get upgrade

BeagleBone Black Ubuntu Precise 12.04.3 LTS

Step 3) Load the Ubuntu into the internal eMMC

Now you have a Ubuntu system on your microSDHC card but you still have the default Ångström Linux inside the embedded eMMC storage.It is now to load the Ubuntu into the internal eMMC too.

Writing to Internal eMMCTo install the image to the internal eMMC, boot from the SD card. While booted from an external SD card, the internal eMMC will be available as /dev/mmcblk1. To write the image to eMMC, execute:# sudo su# xz -cd ubuntu-12.04-armhf-minfs-*.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk1

BeagleBone Black Ubuntu Precise 12.04.3 LTS

Step 4) Expanding the image on the microSDHC card to use the full card storage. (example using a 4GB microSDHC card)

Depending on the size of the uSD card, this could leave a significant amount of space left unused. This article shows how to repartition the uSD card to utilize all of the space on the uSD card. This can be done on an unmounted filesystem or even on a live filesystem. In the example below, the live filesystem of a BeagelBone Black will be resized to take advantage of the full 4GB of space available on the uSD card used in this example.

Step 4.1: Start fdiskTo get started, list the volumes available on a BeagleBone Black that is booted from a uSD card:

The listing above shows an external uSD card is currently booted as indicated by the /dev/mmcblk0 entries and the lack of /dev/mmcblk0boot entries. When booted from the internal eMMC, the device with the /dev/mmcblk1boot entries would instead be at the device zero location as shown here:

Take a moment to examine what fdisk is reporting. The first line indicates that the uSD card is 3947888640 bytes in size. The 4th line reports the sector size to be 512 bytes. Some quick math shows that 3947888640 bytes / 512 bytes per sector = 7710720 sectors as is also reported on the second line. The default “block” size is 1024 bytes, but it does not actually report this unit anywhere. The Start and End columns are reporting 512 byte sectors, and the Blocks column is reporting 1024 byte blocks. The way this .img is partitioned makes the relationship easy to see in this case, but it would not be immediately apparent if this were a large hard disk and the numbers were not as magic. The starting block of the partition table at position 2048 reveals that blocks 0-2047 are not being used for user data. This amounts to a full megabyte (2048 * 512 bytes per block = 1048576 bytes), and this is the default of fdisk. The first partition is 2048 sectors in size, or 1024K, which confirms the block size being 1K.

To calculate the total size of the space used on the disk, there are 2048 sectors at the head reserved for partitioning, 2048 sectors in mmcblk0p1, and 3,751,936 sectors in mmcblk0p2 for a total of 3,756,032 sectors. With each sector using 512 bytes, this totals 1,923,088,384 bytes. The choice of 1,923,088,384 bytes was used to make this image the exact size of the BeagleBone’s available eMMC space (note that 1,923,088,384 bytes / 1024^2 = 1834 MB). It is also a good size because not all external 2 GB uSD cards are exactly 2048 * 1024^2 in size. Having it a bit under 2 GB makes it a sure fit.

Repartitioning the disk is rather easy since fdisk will prompt with smart default choices. The steps below will begin by deleting partition 2, then recreate it as a larger size, and finally write the new table to the disk only at the end. Notice the emphasis on the last part: No changes are actually committed to disk along the way — only by pressing ‘w’ at the end will cause changes to be written. If you make a mistake or panic, just hit ‘q’ to quit and no changes will have been made.

Press ‘n’ for new, ‘p’ for primary, and ’2′ for partition 2. Specify start and end sectors for the new partition — just select the default values by pressing enter. In fact, outside of the the first ‘n’ they were all default choices and pressing enter alone to confirm the choice is all that is needed.

That is it! Select ‘w’ to commit the changes to the uSD card. Notice that the partition table in this example was “busy” so a reboot was needed to cause the changes to be reflected. Even if it were not busy, it seems like it could be a good idea to reboot at this point if you want to be extra safe.

Command (m for help): w

The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: Re-reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device or resource busy.The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used atthe next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8)Syncing disks.root@debian-armhf:/# reboot

Step 4: Expand the Filesystem

This is the last step. Now that the second partition is larger, expand the filesystem to match the larger partition using resize2fs.

If you would like to have a small size linux computer with mobile broadband this can be one option for you. Possibilities nearly infinite regarding the applications of such device. For e.g. you want to place it to a remote location where you need Internet access and other linux based functionality (web/file server, monitoring, VPN, etc) and all with a low power solution.

I have got an unlocked Huawei 3G Dongle and made it work with the BeagleBone Black running Ubuntu.All we need is to install one additional software called wvdial.